


Bit Players

by afterandalasia



Series: Horror Film Responses [1]
Category: Friend Request (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Dialogue, Character Death, Character Death Fix, Coda, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Horror, Implied/Referenced Sex, POV Minor Character, Suicide, Trans Male Character, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 08:12:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10509816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: If they took notice every time Laura friended someone on Facebook, they’d never get anything else done, but they all notice Marina. Sure, some of her art is kind of cool, but most of it is plain fucking creepy, and that’s coming from a bunch of psych students. Isabel tries to intervene, but Laura kind of waves her away, and, well, Gustavo figures that they’re all adults and that Laura certainly has plenty of practice dealing with Facebook friends.He never expects how it all spirals down, into violence and terror and death, and before too long he's not sure whether they're even going to see the far side of it at all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone following for my usual Disney/non content and wondering what the hell this is... you aren't alone. I watched this movie and ended up with this plotbunny, so it had to be written.
> 
> The dialogue in the scene where Gustavo and Isabel are talking on the phone about chocolate is taken from canon - it's what gave me the idea to write Gustavo as trans. Somehow from there I became much more invested in them and their relationship than I ever was in the main character.

When Gustavo goes to college, he figures it’s going to be the best thing he ever does. Away from his childhood town, away from the kids who refused to be his friends, away from his mother and her constant eye-rolling and passive-aggressive comments that make it clear how disappointed she is by her son (her _daughter_ ) and comments on how she does right by her family. It’s bullshit, but he doesn’t realise how much bullshit it is until he’s leaving freely at college, using his own name, staying up too late and doing his coursework at the last minute and living a normal life.

His freshman year is a heady rush, and it feels so good and his friends are so great that somewhere along the line he doesn’t even bother hiding that he’s trans. The idea of them knowing just isn’t scary, in the way that it used to be in his home town. Probably it helps that girls and guys hang out together, away from the high school cliques and their gender segregation. They sort of congregate around their major instead, and even though Laura is more interested in forensic psychology, and Olivia is into sports psychology, and Gustavo is admitting to himself that he wants to look at counselling and maybe even gender counselling, they all need the same books and stay up late cramming for the same exams, and it’s easy to fall into friendship with them.

Then Isabel appears, and she really is the best fucking thing that ever happens to him. She comes to him wild-eyed because he has some textbook that she needs for an essay she was supposed to have finished a week ago; when he bumps into her a fortnight later and asks her how things went they end up consoling each other about their asshole lecturers over coffee and a slice of cake that they share because they’re both students and too fucking poor to have one each.

It turns out she’s Facebook friends with Laura, because everyone is fucking Facebook friends with Laura, and before long they’re hanging out together, swapping jokes and stories, and then they’re partying together and swapping tongue in dark corners. She’s fucking gorgeous, and doesn’t even seem to realise it, with full lips and stunning hair and tits that he just wants to drown in. She hates her nose, but Gustavo thinks it’s adorable, and takes every opportunity that he can to press a kiss to it remind her how perfect every part of her is.

She doesn’t care that he’s got a pussy. Alright, so when he tells her she kind of looks awkward, but then she asks what he prefers to call it and their relationship just goes on as normal. They make out noisily in public and doze off on each other’s shoulders in class, and after one drunken night out he discovers that it gets her really hot when he whispers in her ear how wet it makes him to watch her dance. She buys him a strap-on for his birthday and calls it a convertible, and he laughs too hard and for too long because it shouldn’t be that funny, but for days afterwards one of them will say that she got him a convertible for his birthday and they’ll both crack-up again.

By third year, they don’t just move out of dorms, they move in together, although Laura and Olivia are in the apartment as well so it’s not like it’s just _them_. But he knows that they’re both aware that they’re learning to share a kitchen, to share a bathroom, to decide what to watch on TV and curl up on the couch with the largest bar of chocolate they can find when their cycles decide to sync.

 

 

 

 

 

If they took notice every time Laura friended someone on Facebook, they’d never get anything else done, but they all notice Marina. Sure, some of her art is kind of cool, but most of it is plain fucking creepy, and that’s coming from a bunch of psych students. Isabel tries to intervene, but Laura kind of waves her away, and, well, Gustavo figures that they’re all adults and that Laura certainly has plenty of practice dealing with Facebook friends. Besides, his cramps are a bitch this month and he’s got like three huge essays he needs to finish, besides Laura’s party coming up and everyone privately trying to one-up each other to get the best present.

He doesn’t even think anything of it until that creepy chick starts fighting with Laura in the canteen the morning after her birthday party. It escalates faster than he can think _attachment issues_ , but then just as quickly the girl is gone and the best that they can do is sit with Laura while she processes what the fuck just happened. He tries to crack jokes, and knows that they fall flat.

It’s just a fight, though, even if it is a weird one; it’s not like they don’t happen a dozen times a day on campus.

None of them expect the girl to kill herself.

Laura blames herself and, fuck it, they’re all psych students, they know _why_ at the same time that they know that it’s absolute bullshit.

He’s so busy with his essays that he doesn’t even check his Facebook until he gets a freaked-out call from Isabel about the fucked-up stuff on Laura’s account. He can’t help but look, but recoils from the screen and closes the tab as soon as he realises what it is. His first thought is to wonder how the fuck that got onto Laura’s account, because he knows Laura and she wouldn’t do shit like that, not like that girl in class whose first question was about the video, and his second is to wonder why this chick Marina would record her suicide at all. Putting it out there almost makes it feel like a cry for help, but the noose and the fire together don’t seem that way, and Gustavo feels sick as he realises he’s trying to apply psychology already. Probably a way of coping. _Fuck,_ he hates knowing the workings of his own head sometimes.

He doesn’t know enough about computers to even offer help, but he sends Laura a private message saying that he hopes she’s okay, and he knows that it’s not her. The computer glitches, and he’s not sure whether it’s sent or not, but he’ll see her this evening anyway.

Laura doesn’t come back that night, but she texts Olivia to say that she’s staying with Tyler. Probably the best thing for her. Olivia heads out, saying that she needs some air, and Laura takes off to get takeout for them because although neither of them feel like eating. She’s out the door before Gustavo remembers that they’ve eaten most of the chocolate in the apartment, and they’re all going to be wanting some after the past few days.

He grabs his phone, calls her, and feels the stress start to leak from him as their conversation makes him feel _normal_ again for the first time in a couple of days. She teases him about the chocolate, pretending not to know what brand he always gets.

“Just ask the guy there!” he says, actually finding himself close to laughter. “I go there all the time; white chubby kid who wants chocolate.”

“Baby, you’re not chubby!” Isabel replies, which is an utter lie but neither of them care. He knows it’s partially that his face looks chubby, features rounded, but he’s not exactly Mr Universe. “But you are _fussy_ , my God” she adds.

“I’m not being fussy! I’m on my period, and chocolate makes me feel better.”

She was the first one he’d admitted that to, as if the hankering for chocolate was somehow un-masculine. Periods were just a biological function, whatever, he could handle them, but the desire for chocolate had been his guilty secret until Isabel. It feels good to say it these days, a reminder of who he is, who she is, and who they are together. She doesn’t give a fuck about it, other than to be annoyed if they run out altogether. It feels amazing, even with everything that’s happened.

He wonders for a moment whether it will ever stop feeling this great.

The phone goes dead with a crackle, and his smile evaporates; it’s their joke, not something that should make her cut him off. It’s not his battery, and there’s no tunnels between the apartment and the store, though she does tend to forget about her charger so it could be that she ran out of battery on him. He’s just about to wave it off as nothing more than that when his laptop screen flickers.

The images go to negative, to static, stretching and distorting across his screen, and he can’t help the rush of adrenaline, of fear. Then the screen goes completely dead, nothing but his own dim-outlined reflection staring back at him with empty eyes.

Fuck, this is too weird. Something creaks behind him, and he was sure everyone was out, what the hell. “Chet?” he tries, a wild guess. Chet was a friend of Laura’s who housesat for them last break and kept forgetting to drop their spare keys back. Maybe it’s a stupid guess, but it’s the only one he can come up with. “Hello?”

The house is creepily silent, and he knows it’s no quieter than usual but it _feels_ it. Two days ago one of his friends had a fight with a girl in their Psych class and yesterday that same girl killed herself. He’s studied enough psych to know that shit like that can screw with your head.

“Kobe?” He wouldn’t put it past Kobe to be able to pick locks. Why he’d do it, Gustavo has no fucking clue, but his heart is pounding in his chest as he makes his way towards the front door and every nerve in his body is screaming. Evolutionary psychology might be mostly quackery, but it knows an adrenaline rush when it feels it. “You guys, this isn’t funny. Seriously.”

The front door is open, and fuck, he hopes that Isabel didn’t just forget to close it when she went to the store. Or maybe he hopes that she did, because at least then there’s a fucking explanation for that, even if there isn’t one for why all the lights in the corridor have gone out.

He turns on the light on his phone, wondering whether the super will be downstairs to get the fucking lights turned back on, but when he opens what should be the door to the stairwell it’s full of… _things._ Bloodied, ripped-to-pieces dolls and weird black scribbles, and a dull buzzing sound that explains itself when he pans his phone upwards to reveal a huge black wasp’s nest in the corner. In an explosion of noise, the wasps burst out, and his nerve gives out and he runs. Stupidly, blindly, tripping over his own bare feet and just seeing darkness and dim, closed doors.

He scrambles to the elevator, all but throws himself inside, and hammers the button for the ground floor. The lights are only dim, but the elevator is still moving, and too much panic is rushing through his veins for him to think about anything other than _getting to the ground floor_. He wants to get _out_ , and he wants to see _people_ , someone else, anyone else, who can tell him that what he’s seeing is real and not some sort of horrific waking nightmare.

The doors close, and he slumps against the back wall, clutching his phone in a sweating hand. He _knows_ he can’t have seen that shit there, not really, so it’s his phone or his mind or something that’s playing tricks, but it’s kind of hard to keep your cool when you’re seeing giant fucking wasps in a small room where there should have been a stairwell.

Then the lights go out.

He might whimper, he isn’t even sure if that’s just in his head or not. He turns on his phone, shaking, and tries the ground floor button again, and again. But there’s a rustling behind him, a crackling that he can hear even under his own ragged breath, and he turns and pans the camera upwards to see more of those weird fucking symbols scratched into the metal wall of the elevator, and another huge nest clinging to the corner, covered in glistening black wasps.

Desperately, he tries to tell himself to stay still, to stay quiet. That the wasps won’t attack unless they’re threatened. But they’re too large, too glossy, they don’t look quite real and it’s fucking terrifying, and then _something_ in the darkness snatches his phone from his hand, and he screams.

It rings on the metal, rattles in his head. Pain blazes on the right side of his neck, pinprick sharp but spreading like fire over his skin, and he tries to slap at it but then there’s another on his left arm, and a third on his jaw, and it’s like someone is jabbing red-hot pokers into his skin. He screams and screams, and tries to slap at them, feeling the crackling bodies against his skin but never able to catch them, and the buzzing fills his ears until it feels like it’s inside his fucking head.

It’s all a blur of blackness and pain, and he feels blood under his hands and tastes it in his mouth, thrashes against the torture of the stings and only recognises dimly that he’s hitting the walls of the elevator because it hurts less than the stinging does. And it won’t end, it won’t fucking end and he can’t get away from it, and the last thing that he thinks he hears is someone else’s scream before everything goes black.

 

 

 

 

 

He wakes up in hospital. It’s cold and bright and smells of antiseptic, and the doctors explain that they had to pump him full of antihistamine and morphine and they weren’t even sure that he was going to live. His skull is fractured, his ribs are cracked, his hands and wrists are bruised in every place that they aren’t broken, and his throat hurts from being intubated. He wants Isabel, desperately, but can’t even speak to say it, just croak vaguely.

If he’d thought the doctors were bad, the cops are worse. They tell him that they don’t know what’s going on, and that until they do they’re not even going to tell anyone that he’s alive. They’re going to let his friends and his family and his fucking girlfriend think that he’s dead because they don’t understand what fucked-up bullshit is terrifying everyone at the school, and when they start talking about how the footage of what happened to him has ended up on Laura’s Facebook he feels his heart speed up in his chest and his hands start to shake with anger and terror both together, and the doctors have to force the cops to leave.

They leave him alone.

It’s lonely and chilly and fucking _boring_ , and all that he has in his head is the image of bloody dolls and huge black wasps, with only the beeping of machines to keep him company when beeping is the last thing that he wants to hear. He manages to communicate to staff to ask for one of his textbooks, _anything_ , fucking War and Peace if that’s all that they’ve got, and even if the words don’t go in while he’s reading it, clumsily and carefully turning the pages gives him something to do.

One of the nurses tells him that Isabel is being treated for shock; apparently she was the one who found him, beating his head against the elevator wall to try to get away from the pain of the stings. He doesn’t remember it, and it makes him feel sick. He pleads with the cops, with a still-aching throat, that they just let her know that he is still alive, and when they refuse he tries to get out of bed to find her himself. His legs give way from under him, and when he catches himself on his hands it’s like crunching glass beneath his skin and pain that almost makes him black out. He fucking hates them, even as they try to help him back into the bed and shout for the nurses, and he’s pretty sure that he tells them as much.

He just wants them to figure out what the fuck is going on, so he get out of this place, out of hospital pyjamas and away from hospital food. So that he can feel like he’s alive again.

 

 

 

 

 

The next time that he sees Isabel again, she’s slit her own throat.

It sounds like something that should be fatal, should always be fatal, but she was right in the hospital and the doctors were there in under a minute. He faintly remembers something about that ice skater who got his throat slit open and survived, about a doctor holding the wound shut, but he can still hardly hold back the panic because _his fucking girlfriend slit her own throat_ and he has zero fucking doubt that the police letting her think he was dead had something to do with it.

So it comes to this, them not seeing each other again until she’s in bandages and sedated and he’s shuffling around with his face bruised and swollen and his hands so bandaged and splinted that only his fingertips protrude. At first, he’s not even sure that she can feel him holding her hand, but then she turns to look at him and tears start rolling down her cheeks.

The first thing she says, whispers really, is, _“It’s all about fucking Laura. We’re just pieces of her story.”_

He thinks about Laura, and that girl Marina, and what the police are saying and doing, and he knows that she isn’t even fucking wrong. They’re just pawns in someone else’s sick game, and they don’t even know what the rules are. His kisses her hand with his bloodied lips, and sits with her, and is grateful that the doctors at least let him do so.

 

 

 

 

 

The cops say that Isabel has to be ‘dead’ as well, and he’s angry all over again, but at least there’s no reason that they can’t be dead together. He’s still mumbling and can’t write, and Isabel can’t speak, and it’s got to be worse for her because she was still close to her parents while he’d moved away from his bitch of a mother. And they think she’s dead, while she’s sitting in a hospital bed with nobody but him and the nurses and, to judge by the dark circles under her eyes, the same nightmares that he’s going through.

The police say that they’re coming in to keep them updated, but Gustavo hears the questions, the way that they leave the ends of sentences unfinished in the hope that he will tell them something that he hasn’t already. It’s Psych 101, and it just makes him angrier because fuck, he wants this over as well, if he knew anything he would have told them just to get out of this room and breathe air that didn’t smell like medicine again. But they keep asking, and he keeps trying to think of anything else, and Isabel still has that haunted look in her eyes.

The first sound that Isabel manages to make is when the police tell them that Olivia has died. Gustavo watches them, can see that one doesn’t want to tell them the details, but the other does and watches their reactions. As if there’s some confusion about how they’re going to react to the fact that their roommate jumped out of a window then shot herself in the head. He can’t even make a noise, feels like his head is full of the buzzing again, until his heart is racing and his vision narrows down to a grey tunnel. They call for the nurses again, and only then do they manage to do something that makes the pain fade.

 

 

 

 

 

They never find out exactly what happened. It gets put down to stress and internet addiction and adolescent drama, and privately Gustavo thinks that’s bullshit as well but it’s _over_ , and he can’t bring himself to care any more. The police say that Kobe killed Tyler and attacked Laura, before dying of anaphylactic shock from being attacked by the same wasps that stung Gustav. Considering Kobe was the one among them with any computer skills, Gustavo sees how it’s easy to blame everything on him, even if he doesn’t think that’s really what happened.

Neither he nor Isabel can face Laura. They both know that whatever happened, it was about _her_ , and he at least can’t help hating her for it. The idea that their lives were just toys to whoever was doing this is sickening, and the last contact they have with Laura is to clear their shit out of the apartment and leave.

Isabel’s parents cry for what seems like hours when they find out that she’s alive. They’re well-off; her mother is an air traffic controller or something and Gustavo had no idea that paid so well, but apparently it does. They get her into therapy, pay her medical bills at a sweep, and for some reason welcome him as well without batting an eyelash, although Gustavo thinks that might be just relief at Isabel being alive as well. They let him stay in their spare room, her dad seems to think he needs feeding up, and there’s always a ready chocolate supply.

They delete their Facebook profiles at the same time, curled up together on Isabel’s bed. It feels like an end, and a relief.

Gustavo kisses her temple. “Let’s go to a different college,” he says, softly. They’ve still got half the year to recover, can find somewhere else in the autumn. They’re already several states from where everything happened, far enough towards the centre of the continent that the weather is different, and even that seems to help. “Different majors. Change it all.”

Isabel nods. She can talk again, but still doesn’t all that much. Whether the pain is in her throat or her mind, Gustav knows that it’s plenty real.

He takes hold of her hand, carefully; he’s still got the occasional deep bruise working its way out, and he’s got these weird numb spots that he’ll probably never get feeling back in again. His handwriting is barely legible, but he’s getting there.

“You and me,” he says. “No more bit players. We make our _own_ story.”

“And no more fucking Facebook,” Isabel whispers.

Grimly, he smiles, and kisses her again. “Yeah. No more fucking Facebook.”


End file.
